A few weeks ago I received an email from my former publisher, PublishAmerica informing me that Amazon will no longer make PublishAmerica books available for purchase, however the titles as they currently appear on their website, will still be displayed.

Obviously, I don’t have a dog in this fight, and whatever Amazon does with its website is fine with me. They have (as does PublishAmerica) the legal right to do with their website, what they wish.

The discourse apparently started awhile back, when Amazon purchased their own printing firm and announced that all POD (print on demand) books would now be printed exclusively by Amazon.

Of course, this doesn’t sit well with most of the POD publishers, in that aside from publishing, their core business is “print on demand”, and one would imagine a large part of their profit margin, as reflected in the larger then average retail prices, in almost all POD books.

In the case of PublishAmerica, with its 30,000 titles, one can see why Amazon would want a piece of that business. Of course PublishAmerica doesn’t see it that way, they feel that Amazon has used a strong-arm approach and intimidation, and perhaps they have.

However, in truth it’s no different then what PublishAmerica does to its own family of authors, who disagree with PA’s policies. Ironically they’ve used their own website as punishment tool and have banned countless authors for merely disagreeing with them.

I’m no longer welcome on their message board, simply because I questioned their lack of enthusiasm in promoting their best selling authors, within the mainstream. Of course, like Amazon, it’s their website to do with, as they please, and that to me is the core issue.